Aphorisms

21 Pages·2015·0.12 MB·English

PLEASE ADD on a separate page after the introduction.
NOTICE
Aphorisms are different from conventional text. The author recommends reading no more
than four aphorisms in one sitting. It is also preferable to select these randomly.

Additional Aphorisms, Rules, and Heuristics (Added to the Incerto)
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
I Preludes
II Counter Narratives
III Matters Ontological
IV The Sacred and the Profane
V Chance, Success, Happiness, and Stoicism
VI Charming and Less Charming Sucker Problems
VII Theseus, or Living the Natural Life
VIII The Republic of Letters
IX The Universal and the Particular
X Fooled by Randomness
XI Aesthetics
XII Ethics
XIII Robustness & (Anti) Fragility
XIV The Ludic Fallacy and Domain Dependence
XV Epistemology and Subtractive Knowledge
XVI The Scandal of Prediction
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XVII Being a Philosopher and Managing to Remain One
XVIII Economic Life and Other Very Vulgar Subjects
XIX The Sage, the Weak, and the Magnificent
XX The Implicit and the Explicit
XXI On the Varieties of Love and Nonlove
XXII The End

[Ignore numbering. The Roman number indicates the section where the aphorism is to be
added.]

I2. Erudition without bullshit, intellect without cowardice, courage without imprudence,
mathematics without nerdiness, scholarship without academia, intelligence without shrewdness,
religiosity without intolerance, elegance without softness, sociality without dependence,
enjoyment without addiction, religion without tolerance, and, above all, nothing without skin in
the game.
I 1. People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than in what you
are trying to hide.
II 3. A government stating, “We will not stand idle in front of atrocities committed by
[foreign dictator XYZ]” is typically trying to mitigate the guilt for standing idle in front of more
atrocities committed by said XYZ.
II 4. Almost all those caught making a logical fallacy interpret it as a “disagreement.”
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II 5. France took Algeria hoping for a country to eat cassoulet, and instead France is now
eating couscous.
II 6. If powerful assholes don’t find you “arrogant,” it means you are doing something
wrong.
II 7. If someone is making an effort to ignore you, he is not ignoring you.
II 8. In your prayers substitute “Protect us from evil” with “Protect us from those who
improve things for a salary.”
II 9. Most mistakes get worse when you try to correct them.
II 10. Much of the difference between what is work and what is leisure is branding.
II 11. Never read a book review written by an author whose books you wouldn’t read.
II 12. One of life’s machinations is to make some people both rich and unhappy, that is,
jointly fragile and deprived of hope.
II 13. People don’t like it when you ask them for help; they also feel left out when you
don’t ask them for help.
II 14. Sometimes people ask you a question with their eyes begging you to not tell them
the truth.
II 15. The dream of having computers behave like humans is coming true, with the
transformation, in a single generation, of humans into computers.
II 16. The first one who uses “but” has lost the argument.
II 17. The main reason to go to school is to learn how not to think like a professor.
II 18. The modern hypocrite gives the designation “respect” to what is nothing but fear of
the powerful.
II 19a.[INSERTED] If you want strangers to help you, smile. For those close to you, cry.
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II 19. We tend to define rudeness less by the words used (what is said) than by the status
of the recipient (to whom it is addressed).
II 20. When someone writes “I dislike you but I agree with you,” I read “I dislike you
because I agree with you.”
II 21. It is a very powerful manipulation to let others win the small battles.
II 22. People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is
actually more intelligent than they are.
III 23. Automation makes otherwise pleasant activities turn into “work.”
III 24. For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.
III 25. If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly; if
you forget (some) things, it means that your mind knows how to filter; and if you feel sadness, it
means that you are human.
III 26. It is not possible to have fun when you try.
III 27. Life is about execution rather than purpose.
III 28. The good life—the vita beata—is like reading a Russian novel: It takes two
hundred pages of struggling with the characters before one can start enjoying things. Then the
agitation starts to make sense.
III 29. The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain why you did something.
III 30. Thinking that all individuals pursue “selfish” interests is equivalent to assuming
that all random variables have zero covariance.
III 31. We need to feel a little bit lost somewhere, physically or intellectually, at least
once a day.
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IV 32. Atheists are just modern versions of religious fundamentalists: both take religion
too literally.
IV 33. Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing
man from thinking that he is God.
IV 34. Paganism is decentralized theology.
IV 35. The ancient Mediterranean: before monotheism, people changed and exchanged
rites and gods as we do ethnic foods.
IV 36a. The fewer the Gods the greater the dogma and theological intolerance. So n=0
(“modern” atheists), n= 1 (Sunni purists), n=1-2 (Monophysites), n=3-12 (Greek Orthodoxy), n
flex (Ancient Mediterranean Paganism).
IX 36. For an honest man, freedom requires having no friends; and, one step above,
sainthood requires having no family.
V 37. Never hire an A student unless it is to take exams.
V 38. Business wars are typically lost by both parties; academic wars are won by both
sides.
V 39. Corollary: if you socialize with someone with a smaller bank account than yours,
you are obligated to converse as if you had exactly the same means, eat in the places where he
eats, at no point in time show the pictures of your vacation in Provence or anything that hints at
the differential in means.
V 40. Did you notice that collecting art is to hobby-painting as watching pornography is
to doing the real thing? Only difference is status.
V 41. Do not socialize with people much richer than you; but if you do, do it in your own
territory (restaurants you can afford, wine, etc.)
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V 42. I wonder how many people would seek excessive wealth if it did not carry a
measure of status with it.
V 43. In the days of Suetonius, 60 percent of prominent educators (grammarians) were
slaves. Today the ratio is 97.1 percent, and growing.
V 44. It is good to not feel envy; but better to neither envy nor be envied.
V 45. Success in all endeavors requires the absence of specific qualities. 1) To succeed in
crime requires absence of empathy, 2) To succeed in banking you need absence of shame at
hiding risks, 3) To succeed in school requires absence of common sense, 4) To succeed in
economics requires absence of understanding of probability, risk, second-order effects, or about
anything, 5) To succeed in journalism requires an inability to think about matters that have even
an infinitesimally small chance of being relevant next January, 6) But to succeed in life requires
a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the
mirror.
V 46. The alpha person at a gathering of “high status” persons is often, detectably, the
waiter.
V 47. The natural benefit of cellphones, laptops, and other indispensable modern items is
the joy one gets finding the object after losing it. Lose your wallet full of credit cards and you
will have a chance to have a great day.
V 48. There is no clearer sign of failure than a middle-aged man boasting of his
performance in college.
V 49. What we commonly call “success” (rewards, status, recognition, some new metric)
is a consolation prize for those who are both unhappy and not good at what they do.
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V 50. You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references
“money” in his conversation.
V 51. You will never know for sure if someone is an asshole until he becomes rich.
V 52. Studying the work and intellectual habits of a “genius” to learn from him is like
studying the garb of a chef to emulate his cooking.
V 53. To figure out how well you will do ten years from now relative to someone else,
count your enemies, count his, and square the ratio.
VI 54. All rumors about a public figure are to be deemed untrue until he threatens to sue.
VI 55. Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a
decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
VI 56. Executive programs allow us to watch people who have never worked lecturing
those who have never pondered.
VI 57. Never get into a business partnership with a retired lawyer unless he has another
hobby.
VI 58. Never show a risk number, even if it is right.
VI 59. People tend to whisper when they say the truth and raise their voice when they lie.
VI 60. The problem with academics is that they really think nonacademics find them
more intelligent than themselves.
VI 61. The rational heuristic is to avoid any market commentary from anyone who has to
work for a living. [DUPL?]
VI 62. Under opacity, incomplete information, and partial understanding, much of what
we don’t understand is labeled “irrational.”
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VI 63. Universities have been progressing from providing scholarship for a small fee into
selling degrees at a large cost.
VI 64. When people say, “I am investing for the long term,” it means they are losing
money.
VI 65. The fact that people in countries with cold weather tend to be harder working,
richer, less relaxed, less amicable, less tolerant of idleness, more (over)organized and more
harried than those in hotter climates should make us wonder whether wealth is mere
indemnification, and motivation is just overcompensation for not having a real life.
VII 66. A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any
book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.
VII 67. A heuristic on whether you have control of your life: can you take naps?
VII 68. Fasting: every human should learn to read, write, respect the weak, take risks in
voicing disrespect for the powerful when warranted, and fast.
VII 69b. In summary, modernity replaced process by result and the relational by the
transactional.
VII 69. High Modernity: routine in place of physical effort, physical effort in place of
mental expenditure, and mental expenditure in place of mental clarity.
VII 70. In real life exams, someone gives you an answer and you have to find the best
corresponding questions.
VII 71. It used to take seven years to figure out if a book is a book or journalism between
covers. Now all one needs is wait two years. Soon, a few months.
VII 72. Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your own
belongings (say, a house, country house, car, or business) start owning you.
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VII 73. One of the shortest books I’ve ever read had 745 pages.
VII 74. Real life (vita beata) is when your choices correspond to your duties.
VII 75. Some ideas are born as you write then down, others become dead.
VII 76. The longest book I’ve ever read was 205 pages. [MOVE TO AFTER VII 73]
VII 77. Formal education is credentials plus negative knowledge, so it sort of works out
on balance.
VII 78. I fail to see the difference between extreme wealth and overdose.
VII 79. It is a curse to have ideas that people understand only when it is too late.
VII 80. The most important aspect of fasting is that you feel deep, undirected gratitude
when you break the fast.
VIII 81. A risk you run when you write a book calling journalists BS vendors is that all
your reviewers will be BS vendors.
VIII 82. A writer told me, “I didn’t get anything done today.” Answer: try to do nothing.
The best way to have only good days is to not aim at getting anything done. Actually almost
everything I’ve written that has survived was written when I didn’t try to get anything done.
VIII 83. Authors deplete their soul when the marginal contribution of a new book is
smaller than that of the previous one.
VIII 84. I want to write books that only those who read them claim they did.
VIII 85. I was told to write medium-sized books. Yet of the two most successful French
novels in history, one is very short (Le Petit Prince, 80 pages), other extra long (Proust’s
Recherche, 3,200 pages), following the statistical arcsine law.
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VIII 86. I wonder why newssuckers don’t realize that if news had the slightest predictive
and nonanecdotal value journalists would be monstrously rich. And if journalists were really not
interested in money they would be writing literary essays.
VIII 87. If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend.
People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity . .
. or get another job.
VIII 88. If you don’t feel that you haven’t read enough, you haven’t read enough.
VIII Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts,
geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and
idiots in words.
VIII 89. Remove all empty words from writings, résumés, conversation, except when
they aim at courtesy.
X 90. God created Monte Carlo and similar places so extremely rich people would come
experience extreme envy.
X 91. A hotshot is someone temporarily perceived to be of some importance, rather than
perceived to be of some temporary importance.
X 92. An academic cannot lose his tenure, but a businessman and risk taker, poor or rich,
can go bankrupt. That is the infuriating inequality.
X 93. If a pilot crashes a plane, n=1 is not anecdote; if he doesn’t crash the plane, n=100
is anecdote.
X 94. It is very difficult to argue with salaried people that the simple can be important
and the important can be simple.
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